With strange composure
by thedorkygirl
Summary: There's a rumor going around that John Crichton is living.


**title**: With strange composure  
**author**: Keren Ziv  
**rating**: K  
**spoilers**: anywhere; this could be future spec for s1 through PKW  
**summary**: _There's a rumor going around that John Crichton is living._

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There's a rumor going around that John Crichton is living, and the woman lets them think so. She finds it more peaceful that way, more serene, than when they know him to be dead. Reverence is gone that for a hero's wife once was.

His children are old now, older than she is, and there is an irony in it that is difficult for her to accept. They rushed into life much like their father and are leaving it with his same sudden speed. They too were heroes, and she has watched them race for death every day of their lives.

Rygel understands; his own children are grown and left him now, an archetype of a dominion of ages past. This figurehead of a leader does not mind so much now as he did in the early cycles, and it gives him time to travel the stars. Sometimes he stops at her world, and they talk of old times and new.

He had come for Crichton's burial, of course, and so had the others, and there they had seen how old the children had gotten. Where only thirty cycles prior they were toddling around and tripping about the gravel-paved drive, those that met the travelers were grown tall and straight. They'd hit their developmental surges early, she told them quietly over Crichton's coffin, and often. She saw how they pitied her for his sons, and she laughed in their faces.

There are grandchildren to consider now, and they are not so fleet of life as their parents and grandfather. The youngest one is a girl, the first in the family since the woman herself, and she's tiny and young and cannot stand the heat of the world on which her father likes to spend his time, doing dealings of questionable business. He lives many days dying at a disenchanting age, just as his father did.

His wife and the girl stay on the woman's world, and she sees much of this little granddaughter whom she blesses for her inhuman deficiencies. She is almost twenty, and the woman thinks that if her skill is moderate enough that she will soon teach the girl how to fly outside of the atmosphere.

"That is what I learned when I was your age," the woman tells the girl one twilight. Rygel is there visiting, and he eats scraps of the evening's meal as the woman talks. "Your age and younger. I flew."

But the girl isn't interested in stories of growing up a Peacekeeper; a constant buzzing on the edge of her awareness that leaves no room for notice of such mundane things as ships and officers instead prompts her to ask about Crichton.

"He was very brave," says the woman, and then she stops. "He was afraid most of the time."

The girl swings a long leg over the edge of the porch railing and laughs in kindly derision. Her father's wife, peeling a fruit with little interest and listening to the woman and the girl with even less, frowns and sighs loudly enough that the woman turns her head. Crichton's sons have chosen quiet, unobtrusive wives, perhaps aware that it would take a somber woman to become a young widow.

Maybe they had just been aware of what she was _not_ in a woman.

Crichton, says the hynerian, felt that the two weren't discordant with one another.

The woman hears the old dominar's words and thinks of the many things of which she is afraid. Loneliness had never been one of them until she had abruptly found herself there. Abandonment wasn't any thing that she'd ever thought she'd taste either. Of love, though, she had always been terrified; now it is the one thing of his to which she still holds.

In the distance, people are approaching the homestead. The woman squints at the horizon and a yonder gathering cloud of dust. Cycles ago it would have made her hand inch toward a pistol strapped to her thigh. Today she stands in one smooth motion and goes to the entrance of the home that she and Crichton built together many springs ago. She pauses there, a hand trailing instead along the wooden doorframe. It is her last weapon, the privacy it offers.

"Pilgrims," she says, and the woman moves an old pair of leather boots from inside to prominence on the porch.

His son's wife doesn't look up when she asks what to tell the strangers who've come to see a hero. The woman says nothing for several microts, her still-keen eyes watching the approaching procession with a framing grievance.

"Tell them -- tell them he's doing business off-world. Refugees, or blowing up something."

Rygel nods.

There's a rumor going around that John Crichton is living, and the woman doesn't tell them differently as her homage to him.

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_finis_


End file.
